Big Dead Place

by Nicholas Johnson

  I brought a pickle down from work, and from seven to midnight we heisted couches from massive furniture piles in the dorm lounges, each of us determined to create a lush cavern for solitary living for the next six months. Later that evening, driving along the north end of the brown dorms with a putrid-orange couch on my forks, I looked down at Robert Scott’s hut across the bay at Hut Point and realized I hadn’t been down there in a while. There, long ago, in that frozen outpost of exploration, I had received a fantastic blowjob.

  Discovery Hut is described by historian Lennard Bickel as “little more than a wooden shell of planking tough enough to withstand the battering blizzards and gales of winter. It was used also for storing equipment and supplies, and by parties in transit, but later it was to be blessed sanctuary to a few debilitated wretches struggling back from one of the most harrowing sledge journeys of all time.” Those debilitated wretches from the Aurora expedition had lived in the filthy hut for months at a time, where water froze within a foot of the stove and they had only three sleeping bags for six people, where they spent the winter flaying seal carcasses and lancing frostbite blisters.

  But I knew only that as my girlfriend’s frozen breath rolled across my stomach, the historic monument curled around me as if I were inside a hazy snowglobe of warm bounty. By my head was a mutilated seal that had been freezing and thawing since the Heroic Age. There was an old box of rocks off to the other side. Nearby was a mutton carcass that had been dripping goo for nearly a century. Though the soot-covered blubber stove had been abstinent since early in the century, the object, wedged in its context, still released history.

  Robert Scott, who erected the hut in 1902, is the most famous man to have died in Antarctica. In 1912 he and his men set out to claim Pole as their prize. Ponies hauled their sleds of supplies and were shot and eaten along the way. One of them, good old Christopher, moved just as they shot him and, with a bullet lodged in his head, angrily stormed into camp before they could finish him off. When they ran out of ponies, they manhauled the sleds until they reached their miserable goal, which Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had already won, leaving behind a tent with a letter inside, and a note asking Scott to forward the letter to the King of Norway.1 2 3 4 Someone once said that Scott went to the Pole an explorer and returned a postman. Scott’s party—who would on the way back die one by one: one lapsed into a coma, another whose hands and feet were frozen meat walked into a blizzard so as not to hold back the others, and the rest froze and starved … miles from a cache of food and fuel—stood at their miserable goal and snapped a photo.

  Scott and his men could never have predicted the events that would occur at this spot. As polar explorers with bellies full of pony meat, all familiar with the horrors of dysentery, they could never have imagined that by century’s end a Human Resources Representative would be whisked to the South Pole in an urgent deployment to discipline two men for calling their assistant “Poopypants.”

  Poopypants was a General Assistant, meaning she had to do a lot of unsavory work for next to no pay. Some say that Poopypants liked to complain, and that she had a knack for politics, as she was fucking the Safety and Health Representative, who didn’t mind too much when she bumped a pedestrian while driving the van. Some did not consider her a hard worker, and it was in this spirit that two workers chided the GA when she was slow returning from break: “C’mon, Poopypants, let’s get with it.”

  Poopypants immediately reported the insult and, because the men were unapologetic during preliminary counseling showdowns, a Denver HR Specialist who had been cut loose for a McMurdo boondoggle rushed down on a disciplinary expedition to the South Pole, where she explained to the men the seriousness of their inappropriate behavior. When one of them asked, “Should I say ‘fecal britches’ instead?” he was fired.5

  My boss asked how big my unit was, but I didn’t know because I’d never measured it. I said I would give her a report, but that in order to measure the girth I would need one of those tailor’s measuring tapes, like Chernobyl had. Jane said she would get me one. And I might need her help, I said. “Yeah right,” she answered on cue.

  The previous day I’d asked her if she knew where her G-spot was. She said she wasn’t sure where it was, because it was hard for her to poke around in there. She explained to me the difference between a pad and a panty liner, and told me she had a very large canal. She told me she once had a boyfriend who liked to whack off with Neosporin, and that she had fucked a guy whose dick was so small that she couldn’t even feel it. She had felt bad for him and didn’t say anything. In contrast, she once fooled around with a guy on the beach in South Carolina who whipped out a femur-sized cock that she didn’t want anywhere near her. The phrase “femur cock” would stay with us all winter.

  On our ten o’clock break the winter Waste crew—Thom, Jane, and I—were settled comfortably in the break shack drinking hot beverages and leafing through Vogue and Cosmopolitan magazines we’d rescued from the trash. Jane—who had once spent two years in the Americorps Program, working in Africa to battle the deadly guinea worm—was excited by a Vogue article on palm-reading. It was a recent hobby, as it turned out, and she even had a palm-reading reference book in her room.

  She began with Thom while I continued reading the National Enquirer. (Most of the magazines in Antarctica are over two years old. This does not seem important until the humiliating day when one joins a lunchtime discussion to find that celebrity gossip must be up-to-the-minute to be of interest to its connoisseurs. 6)

  As I read the magazine, I overheard Jane telling Thom that, though he was very passionate, he would die soon.

  This would be my second palm-reading of the year, as my friend Cyrus had read my palm about a week before I left for McMurdo. Cyrus is conservative, a genius programmer who worked for a certain software empire back when they had cocaine at the office parties. He speaks a dozen languages fluently and can speak 20 others passably, including Basque.

  Cyrus has left his body and traveled around the universe, completely against his will. He wants nothing to do with such experiences. Crystal-stroking new-agers pick him out of a crowd and want to associate with him. He has an old soul, they tell him. But he wants nothing to do with people who want to associate with his old soul. He prefers to associate with people who tell dirty jokes and worry about money. Cyrus is a firm believer in law and order.

  After studying my palms, he told me that my drive to travel was consistent with my nature and was probably a reasonable way to whatever I was looking for. But, he said, “your desire to document everything and to write has nothing to do with what you’re looking for. It’s completely irrelevant to your goals. Your public aspect is superfluous to what you really know is a spiritual mission.”

  Cyrus explained it to me from the beginning.

  The most basic aspect of our existence is our consciousness as physical beings. Because we are anchored to our experience by physical bodies, with thoughts influenced by scars, with emotions influenced by chemicals, with sights seen from one angle at a time through physical eyes, it takes tremendous effort for us to understand the universe we live in. Yet if we could see the real consequences of our actions, he said, the world as we know it would be an entirely different place. If we could see that physical life is only a fragment of the totality of our lives, we would act differently. But we are physical beings, and it is not surprising that we do as we do, limited by our ignorance. The chasm between us is immense, he told me. You recognize that and seek to do everything in your power to expand your physical boundaries. Writing about your experience, though, is inconsequential.

  I asked him what could be done then, trapped in a body like this.

  The only way to learn anything lasting in this physical existence is through other people, he said. Your relationships are spiritual because they help you transcend your limited physical being by understanding other physical beings.

  Now that Thom’s days were numbered, Jane moved beside me and, after e
xamining my hand, declared that my lifeline displayed ominous signs of disease or injury. I was pleased that Jane had read my palm just as the sun was about to go down on the verge of winter, and that her forecast of doom was inspired by an ancient Vogue magazine, whose spiritual influence would reappear a few days later when she handed me a measuring tape.

  The sun dipped lower each day, and the light would be gone soon. The transportation channel merely said, “No flights until August.” There were no more helicopters flying around. No Sprytes back from sea ice camps. No polypacks of shit from field camps. No long food lines. No trash from Pole. No DVs. No journalists. No researchers. Just frozen darkness and a pressurized pot of potential pathos.

  One day I saw a UT with his truck hanging around a pile of useful shelves and crates I had stashed for myself outside the Waste Barn. I approached and said (like a security guard at Wal-Mart who suspects someone of shoplifting), “Can I help you with something?”

  “I’m just checking your heater and fuel tank,” he said. I saw one of my crates in the back of his truck.

  “Oh, okay. Did you just take that crate?”

  “Yeah,” he said. I laughed.

  “This is my shit, dude,” I said, removing the crate from his truck and putting it back in the pile.

  “Oh, I thought it was skua,” he said. “At least I’m an honest thief.”

  We both laughed and introduced ourselves.

  The skua shack right outside the Waste Barn gets passers-by into a foraging mindset, so our food and clothing sometimes disappear from the Waste Barn and the break--shack. A week after I foiled the scavenging UT, a box of V-8 went missing from the break shack. V-8 was very important for Sunday’s Bloody Marys. And if we ran out, that could mean no Bloody Marys until August. Someone was fucking with our drinks.

  Thom had by chance seen one of the UT’s by the break shack one afternoon with a box in his hand. Jane called the UT and told him he’d been seen leaving our break shack with a box the same size as one that had gone missing, and asked whether he knew anything about a box of V-8.

  He didn’t do it, he said, but maybe it was the other UT.

  Jane said it was best if they sorted it out “within their department” and got our juice back “promptly” before things went to “the next level.” Jane was good at this sort of thing. She knew how to use a “work stoppage” or a “safety concern” to our department’s advantage, and could keep a straight face while speaking the code words of the week. The code words are not handed to us, so we have to pick them up along the way from meetings and emails, but many of the potent code words are introduced at Orientation, in the beginning of the summer. That’s where we had watched an ethics video from which we learned that Integrity, Respect, and Teamwork, as well as Quality, Innovation, and Citizenship, were accomplished by avoiding Inappropriate Behavior. The video urged us “to continue the tradition of unquestionable ethics” and to “keep the ethical message alive.” Afterward, a video about bloodborne pathogens taught us to “assume that all blood from all persons is contaminated.”

  A week after Jane made the call, the box of juice was returned to our break shack with a note from one of the UTs saying that he had thought the break shack was the Skua Shack. It was also around this time we noticed that the store was now stocking V-8.

  Winter work routines fairly settled, people began to look toward their recreational winter projects. In March a woman emailed all the other women on station that she was producing a play called The Vagina Monologues and that they should contact her if they wanted to participate. She hung flyers on the bulletin boards around town. A recipient went to HR and said she was offended by the email. The HR guy contacted Denver, and an order came down that the play could not be performed in any public place in McMurdo, which is everywhere, except maybe the dorm rooms. A few days later women were wearing shirts that said “Got Vagina?” and men wore shirts that said “Vagina Friendly,” and someone made a logo that looked like a peace symbol but with a suggestive triangle in the middle, and these were hung everywhere in no time.

  People wrote emails to managers asking for specifics and “expressing their concerns.” A steady stream of people went to HR to see what was going on and why. I talked to the play’s director. She had asked HR for something in writing saying she could not perform the play, but the HR guy told her she couldn’t have anything in writing. Instead, he told her she should write a letter of apology to all the women she had contacted about the play. She said okay, and wrote an email to all the women to apologize for using the word “vagina.” She told me that she sympathized with the HR guy because he was just doing his job and was in a tough position.

  I first met the HR Guy at a Glam Rock theme party in BFC. We sat on the couch and drank and talked for about an hour. He was tall and skinny, with glasses and braces. He said he had worked in the HR business for four years and he knew which companies were good and which were bad. I asked what he thought about Marriott. He rattled off some statistics and said they were a great, world-class company. I asked if he had heard about the guy who was fired for hitting on a man. He said he had. He shrugged. I shrugged. Then we talked about something else.

  When the Vagina Ban didn’t lift, the New Zealanders at Scott Base offered to host the play, at which point Denver decided the play could be held in the McMurdo library, but that the flyers for the play couldn’t use the word “vagina,” and that the play must have a doorman at the entrance warning the audience, with an average age of 36, that they might be offended if they came in. The director conceded, and rehearsals continued without further incident, but now everyone knew that the community harbored a sensitive mole. The grapevine rumbled. What would become of the winter art show? Would nude drawings be banned? Who would use anti-harassment policies with such sweeping scope? Why is the mole in the driver’s seat?

  In mid-March we fired up the Grinder.

  The Diamond Z Tub Grinder is a machine that eats wood from McMurdo’s scrap Woodpile, which grows so colossal as to have hills and valleys. Inside the spinning tub of the Grinder lives a legion of rotating hammers that make quick work of even the largest timbers. The chips thus produced fall onto a conveyor belt that moves them to a second conveyor belt, where they immediately clog in shifting mounds and must be stabbed at with picks and shovels while the conveyors spin and the Grinder spews plumes of dust onto workers like a wooden volcano.

  It takes three or more days to grind the Woodpile, during which town trash retrieval halts and dumpsters bulge impatiently. A delay in grinding, from broken equipment or high winds, exacerbates the trash jam. Grinding infests clothes with wood dust, as if they were full of ticks.

  Grinding is so violent and impressive that people from town find excuses to drive that way and idle their trucks on the road to watch for a few minutes. Chunks of plate metal the size of forearms and pieces of 4x4 covered with nails shoot from the Grinder, but usually in a great arc that allows for easy escape. When an irritable Waste supervisor grumbles to a work center about trash mixed in a Wood dumpster, at the heart of it lies the memory of fleeing for cover in a rain of shrapnel. Where the work center sees an unfortunate oversight, the Waste supervisor sees attempted murder.

  Once fueled and started, the Grinder is in control. It must be closely monitored, and you should not turn your back to it. Friction from the hammers pummeling larger timbers sometimes causes fires, when the spray of wood dust and snow from the tub mixes with smoke. The tub must be kept full of wood; otherwise the Grinder becomes angry and starts throwing debris hundreds of yards—in one case a healthy chunk shattered the window of a loader—or vibrating violently because the hammers have nothing to pulverize. Once the power is cut, the hammers take five minutes to stop whirling. At lunchtime we would grind out the contents of the tub, disengage the hammers, and idle down the engine.

  Typical lunch conversation in winter might include prison rape, gruesome tales of parasitic infection or, as when we arrived from the wood grinder one afternoo
n to sit at our regular table in the dim back room of the Galley, Roger Moore’s dubious qualifications as James Bond. This topic led Ben and Thom to a brief argument over the merits of Mission Impossible 2, but the Rec guy broke up the argument, as it was a rehash from yesterday’s lunch. Sometimes we would carry a theme, such as dead pets, throughout the lunch hour, with everyone at the table throwing personal stories into the kitty. If someone was on a roll, everyone else would just listen to his or her stories. Or we would spend the hour scarfing down stuffed grape leaves or warm hamburgers and unpeeling the strange secret life of someone bundled in the same clothes as 200 other people but identifiable from a distance by his walk, though we didn’t know where he was from. Since we hardly ever talked about our lives outside of The Program, we would be fascinated to learn, after knowing him for much of a year, that the MEC mechanic had for several years run a computer store in a shopping mall.

  But mostly we talked about work.

  One day Jane told us that she had recently found Construction Debris in a Burnables bin by the Heavy Shop Supply building. She was rooting through the bin and noting the variety of junk that was, first of all, not bagged and, second of all, not Burnables anyway. There was cardboard, a broken coffeepot, and wood. One of the Supply guys drove by, so she flagged him down.

  “I know, I know!” He threw up his hands. “I know what you’re going to say. I didn’t do it.”

  Jane explained to him that this particular dumpster had been graciously allowed slack on two distinct occasions already, and that she was tired of doing their work for them just because they were lazy fuckers. One of the other Supply guys came over. Jane described him as bearded and trollish. He argued that garbage is garbage. Jane cited spreadsheets and categorized milvans to prove otherwise.